IQTEST  Melissa Lockwood 

In this show I wanted to let people see what fabric waste looks like. Bringing it onto the runway.  

When fashion designers layout their patterns to mass produce garments 30% of the fabric is thrown away.  Mostly it goes to the landfills as most designers dont want to pay to have it recycled.  

Its not always tiny pieces that get thrown away.  It is a whole variety of shapes and sizes of fabric.  

Many if not all of the shapes can be designed with.  It is just a matter of looking at those unplanned “miracle” shapes as usable.

The process of mass producing garments is basically this:

1. design a garment.

2. create a pattern.

3. Layout the pattern on a big pattern that holds all the individule part of the garments and sizes.

4. Determine how many garments are wanted.

5. Determine how many layers of fabric are needed so that number of each can be cut out. Lets say if you want 50 tee shirts you lay 50 layers of fabric. So you have 50 of each garment part.

*this is where it gets interesting!

When the garment pattern parts are placed to be cut out, nearly always 30% of the fabric is lost as the pieces have space between them.

*this is where my technique, Medtronic Calculations come in to play.

1. After all the 1st line garment parts are laid out you stop and look at the shapes between and you realize you will have 50 of those shapes too.

2. Then as a designer you design with those shapes.

3. You can use radial projetion applied to the same shape pieces or pick and pull vrom various shape pools.